EnPAx Trax: Environmental Peacebuilding Songs "In the Round"

Date & Time
Jun 16, 2026 | 18.00 - 19.30

Participants
Austin Willacy, 2024 EnPAx Arts Fellow (United States)
Mawa Zacharia, Playing for Change (South Sudan/Uganda)
Jimmy Waltman, Trinity Laban Conservatoire (United States/United Kingdom)
Montreal Benesch, Trans Research in Linguistics Lab, University of California Santa Barbara (United States)

Building on ‘in the round’ song-sharing traditions, this workshop provides a place for musicians at the conference to swap songs and the stories behind them in a ‘musical dialogue’. Artists and audiences are invited to participate in an unscripted set meant to be especially generative - musically, but also pedagogically and connectionally. Musicians (at any level!) and fans should come along to co-create a space of connection, collaboration, storytelling, sharing, and teaching. Improv (musically responding in live time, layering on each other’s work) is encouraged, making art that is unique to the moment in time. In between songs shared on an impromptu basis by established performers, the audience will be invited to join in various circle songs. The workshop thus differs from more speech-centric panels or roundtables, but nor is it a concert, given its emphasis on contextualising and re-making music. It instead represents an act of music-making as environmental peacebuilding. ************ Session sponsored by the EnPAx Arts Initiative facilitated by Austin Willacy, 2024 EnPAx Arts Fellow (USA)